Of the thousands of these I’ve received, this is perhaps my favorite student evaluation ever. Thank you anonymous student, for your helpful feedback.

(And if this makes no sense, please watch here, or, if you must, read about it on wikipedia)

It’s hard to have a clear-eyed discussion about academic jobs and tenure, both because emotions and stakes are very high and because everyone (including me) tends to universalize their personal experience. So let me just jot down some closing thoughts in the interest of clarity.

As Julianne says, there is a worry that passionate young scientists who read about how hard it is to get jobs or tenure will be dissuaded from even trying. I certainly appreciate that, and wouldn’t want to be responsible for scaring anyone away from this job I love so much myself. On the other hand, there is a countervailing worry: that in our attempts to convey our own enthusiasm for this career, we will be insufficiently honest about the difficult challenges it entails. I want to be as clear and open as possible about both the joys and the hurdles, and leave it up to responsible individuals to make their own choices. Of course there are many people who happily violate various of the guidelines I suggested, and nevertheless have no trouble getting tenure. It’s the underlying of the guidelines, not any of the individual points, that I would rather have explicit than hidden.

I sometimes hear people complain that senior scientists paint a rosy picture to lure unsuspecting students into their labs, shielding them from the harsh realities of the job market, just to squeeze a few years of indentured servitude out of them before they are blindsided by the realities of the academic career path. Most such griping, I figure, has to be some kind of defense mechanism; I certainly know that when I was in grad school we were all completely aware of what the job market was really like, and talked about it all the time. I make sure to talk openly about it with prospective students, and with students who want to have me as their advisor. But my sense is that there is not as much open talk about the tenure process, so I thought I could add some perspective. My guidelines were quite purposefully stark, to balance some of the vagueness that often characterizes the topic. As long as the institution of tenure exists, some people will be denied it, which is inevitable; what is not fine is if people are legitimately surprised when it happens. That should never occur.

It shouldn’t come as news that getting tenure at a top place requires a certain amount of focus and dedication to the task at hand. It’s not nearly as bad as, say, a concert violinist or an olympic gymnast. Only a very few people get to have these highly sought-after jobs, and it will naturally be beneficial to try as hard as you can if you want to be one of them. My purpose in the blog post was to emphasize what form that trying should take if that is your goal, not to frighten people with how hard it is.

(more…)

Yesterday Sean wrote (yet another) comprehensive insightful post, this one about what’s involved in getting tenure at a “major research university”.  There is a tremendous amount of good advice in that post, and in the comments.

However.

I have to point out that the advice is very heavily weighted not towards “tenure at a major research university” but instead towards “tenure at one of the top 10 schools in the US”.  As evidence, here is a plot of the latest NRC rankings (red) and US News rankings (blue) of physics departments (shamelessly lifted from here — thanks HappyQuark!).  I have helpfully circled in green the departments where Sean has been on the faculty:

Now, this is not saying that much of Sean’s advice isn’t generally applicable, but one should recognize that the vast majority of people who may be seeking tenure advice are not going to be at institutions with tenure criteria as strict as the ones Sean is considering.  There are scads of fantastic scientists doing interesting work at places that aren’t in the top 5 of the NRC rankings, and probabilistically speaking, you’re more likely to be working towards tenure at one of those.  While MIT may have a <50% tenure rate, the odds are far better at many institutions.

Personally, I found Sean’s advice really really dispiriting, and it probably would have freaked me out to read it as a postdoc. And yet, I find myself with “tenure at a major research university” without ever having lost sleep to fears about achieving seemingly impossible standards.  I worked steadily, but not insanely.  I had a couple of kids.   I “dabbled” in other research areas, some of which turned into major research areas down the road.  And it worked out (although, it likely wouldn’t have “worked out” if I was at Chicago or Caltech).

I think if one wants to make a more general statement about “how to achieve tenure”, I think the key is to show that you’ve got “traction”.  Look at recently tenured (<10 years) people in your particular department at your particular university, and evaluate what they tend to do well (say, undergraduate teaching if you’re at Swarthmore, or running giant experiments if you’re at Harvard). Then, demonstrate that you’ve got traction that is pulling you in that direction.

For example, if all the tenured faculty have research grants and students, and you don’t, then you’ll appear to be spinning your wheels.   Instead, if you have a grant or two, and are showing increasing success with your proposals, the tenure committee can believe that you’re evolving into what the department expects of its tenured faculty.  For most universities, you don’t always need to be completely at your destination, but you need to show that you’re actually traveling down the proper path at a decent clip.  The closer you are to the destination, the better your chances, and the more competitive the tenure process, the closer you’d better be.  (Sean’s point about “firing on fear” is basically saying that a tenure denial is based on their fears that you will not wind up getting to where they need/want you to be.)

The final point I’d like to make is my concern that Sean’s fairly conservative prescription eliminates the real “upside potential” of taking risks.  A colleague and I have had many discussions about the fact that, because we were more than willing to leave academia, we were more willing to take risks.  These risks paid off in more interesting research than the path we were headed down as young postdocs.  (The one caveat is paying attention to timescale though — trying to establish a new field of research won’t be a good bet if it takes 10 years to pull off.)

In summary, while Sean’s suggestions are excellent rules for guaranteeing tenure in a physics department at any university in the US (especially that one about being a productive genius!), you can still likely achieve tenure with a less terrifying set of recommendations.

[Update: added a couple of useful points.]

This is the time of year when prospective graduate students are visiting different universities, deciding where they will spend the most formative years of their scientific lives. Amidst the enthusiastic sales pitches, I try to make sure to remind everyone that the odds of success are long — there is a bottleneck that shrinks as you go from grad school to postdoc to junior faculty to tenure. Probably the biggest hurdle is the leap from postdoc to junior faculty; it’s easier to get tenure once you’re a professor (statistically speaking) than to become a professor in the first place.

But it’s not guaranteed! As many of you know, I was denied tenure myself. This actually puts me in a pretty strong position to talk about the ins and outs of what it takes to succeed, having seen lack-of-success (is there a word for that?) up close and personal. I’ve avoided talking too much about this topic, partly because armchair psychologists have trouble resisting the temptation to take anything general I would say and attempting to match it to specific people and aspects in my own case, despite a pretty thorough lack of familiarity with the facts. On the other hand, maybe I can offer some actually useful guidance to people who are trying to do something difficult and important for their future lives.

So here goes: how to get tenure. But first, caveats. My own experience from grad school on has been at top research places, so those are the only ones I can speak usefully about; the situation will generally be very different at places that put more of an emphasis on teaching, for example. So really I’m talking about places that think of themselves as being in the top 10 or so in their research fields. And of course, to every set of rules there are exceptions; it’s not hard to find people who violated one or more of these guidelines, so don’t take them as written in stone. Every case, and every department, is different. Finally, don’t think of these as too bitter or cynical; I’m simply trying to be honest, with perhaps a small slant to counteract some of the misinformation that is out there. (This misinformation doesn’t usually arise from willful lying, but from the slightly schizophrenic nature of the mission of research universities; see The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People.) I’m generally in favor of the tenure system; like democracy, it’s the worst system out there, except for all the other ones that have ever been invented.

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. Here is the Overriding Principle: what major research universities care about is research. That’s all. Nothing else. But even once you recognize that, there is still some craft involved in shaping your research career in the right way. This isn’t the place for me to pass judgment on this principle; I’m just elucidating its consequences. This is a how-to manual for the real world, not a roadmap for Utopia.

You’ll be pleased to learn that there are actually two different routes to getting tenure, so you can choose which one works better for you. The first one is simple to describe, and comes down to a single suggestion:

• Be a productive genius. This deserves to be classified as a separate technique because, for the small number of easily-recognized true geniuses out there, the rest of the suggestions below are beside the point. Do whatever else you like, as long as you are revolutionizing the field on a regular basis. It’s worth stressing the word “productive,” though. The trash heap of history is littered with geniuses who thought it was beneath their dignity to actually produce anything; that won’t fly, generally speaking, in this game. So if the genius thing is working out for you, great; just be sure to put it to productive use, and you’ll be fine.

The rest of us schlubs, on the other hand, need a more explicit checklist. So here’s what ordinary people should try to do if they have a junior faculty job at a major research university, and would like to get tenure. (more…)

On the one hand, it’s extremely convenient for young academically-oriented people to grab an email account with Gmail or some other generic provider. The nature of the profession is that you will jump around from institution to institution — grad school, postdocs, faculty positions — and it’s extraordinarily annoying to have to keep switching email addresses with every move. Changing jobs is hassle enough as it is.

On the other hand — it’s letter-of-recommendation season, and there are still some backwards institutions out there who refuse to accept letters submitted from non-academic email addresses. Grrr. Get with the program, people!

Okay, not every blog post will be deep.

Update: prodded by Anil in comments, I verified that indeed Gmail is smart enough to let you use Gmail to send from any other email address you have. Just go to “Settings,” then “Accounts and Import,” then “Send Mail As.” Obviously you can’t use just any address, only ones you can verify. Hooray for Gmail!

As has been oft remarked on this blog, we are in a golden age of astrophysics and cosmology. The data is pouring down from the heavens, in large part from 14 state-of-the-art NASA space telescopes. However, this cornucopia of astronomy is about to come to a crashing stop. We are at the high-water mark, and the next few years are going to see a rapid decline in the number of observatories in space. In five years most, if not all, of these telescopes will be defunct (WMAP is already in the graveyard), and it’s not clear what will be replacing them. This is brought into startling focus by the following plot:

The dotted line shows “today”. In a few years, the only significant US space observatory may be the James Webb Space Telescope (assuming it’s on budget and on time, neither of which are to be taken for granted). The reasons for the current “bubble” in resources, and the impending crash, are myriad and complex. These missions take many years, if not multiple decades, to plan and execute, and we are currently reaping the harvest of ancient boom times. But one aspect subtly implied by this graph is the impact of JWST on space funding. The cost of this mission is now over $5 billion, and continues to rise. Very optimistically, the mission will be in space in 2014, and will continue to consume major developmental resources until then. In an era of fiscal austerity, it is difficult to imagine that the immense ongoing cost of JWST leaves room for much else to be done. The community has gone through the painful exercise of winnowing down its “wish list” to a few key, high-impact missions (as detailed by Julianne here, here, and here; my summary here). It is not immediately apparent that even this fairly “modest” list is attainable given current budget realities. Astronomical data from space over the next decade will pale in comparison to the previous one. We are at a unique moment in the history of space astronomy; it is highly unlikely that we will have fourteen major space astrophysics missions flying again within our lifetimes. We need to make the most of what we have, while we still have it.

Caltech had its commencement ceremony last Friday, and I donned a cap and gown to march up on stage with the other faculty members. It’s always a great day, as years of work comes to fruition for several hundred students, ready to move on to the next stage of their careers.

Naturally, there was singing. The Glee Club sent spirits soaring with the Caltech alma mater, “Hail CIT.”

In southern California with grace and splendor bound,
Where the lofty mountain peaks look out to lands beyond,
Proudly stands our alma mater, glorious to see.
We raise our voices proudly, hailing, hailing thee.
Echos ringing while we’re singing, over land and sea.
The hall of fame resound thy name, noble CIT.

The one that got my attention, however, was the other song — Gaudeamus Igitur, apparently a “traditional college song.” How have I spent so many years in academia without coming across this one? It was sung in Latin, but a helpful translation into English was provided.

Therefore let us rejoice
While we are young
After pleasant youth,
After troublesome old age,
The earth will have us.

Where are they who before us
Were in the world?
You can cross the heavens,
You can go to hell,
If you wish to see them.

Our life is brief,
Shortly it will end.
Death comes quickly,
It snatches us cruelly,
No one is spared.

Long live the academy!
Long live the professors!
Long live each student!
Long live all students!
May they always flourish!

Cheerful, no? We’re all going to die, but at least the university will live on. Comforting.

And now Wikipedia informs me that a few verses were apparently left out of our version. To wit:

Long live all girls
Easy and beautiful!
Long live mature women also,
Tender and lovable
Good [and] productive,

Long live the state as well
And he who rules it!
Long live our city
[And] the charity of benefactors
Which protects us here!

Let sadness perish!
Let haters perish!
Let the devil perish!
Let whoever is anti-student
As well as the mockers!

So they left out the bits that were veering uncomfortably close to sexism, fascism, and serial killer-ism. I’m thinking they didn’t want the ceremony to drag on for too long.

It’s that time of year again. Young graduate students, having toiled for several years at the feet of Science, are kicked out of the nest to take their places among the ancient and honorable community of scholars. If you will forgive the mixed metaphors.

This week we had a double-decker celebration: both Heywood Tam and Moira Gresham successfully defended their Ph.D. theses. Congratulations to both!

Heywood was stuck with me as an advisor, but he seems to have turned out okay. We worked together on a number of papers that looked into models of Lorentz violation, including issues of extra dimensions and stability. More recently we’ve been finishing a couple of papers on fine-tuning in the early universe — coming soon to a preprint server near you! In the Fall Heywood will leave the dry heat of SoCal for the damp heat of Florida.

Moira’s advisor was Mark Wise, but we also interacted quite a bit. She and I collaborated with Heywood and Tim Dulaney on a couple of aether papers, and she and Tim recently wrote a really interesting paper on anisotropic inflation. But she promises that her next project will be completely Lorentz-invariant. And she’ll be doing it from Ann Arbor, where she’ll be joining the Michigan physics department as a member of the Society of Fellows.

Always bittersweet when students graduate; it will be a loss to Caltech when the leave, but it’s great to see people launch their independent research careers. Best of luck to both Moira and Heywood!

The day is approaching fast when grad-students-to-be need to be making decisions about where to choose. Probably undergrads, too, although I confess that I have no real idea what the calendar for that looks like.

So, good luck with all that decision-making! Here are links to our previous posts about the topic.

• Unsolicited Advice: Choosing a Grad School
• On Choosing a Grad School: A Dialogue
• Unsolicited Advice: Choosing an Undergraduate School

Not too much to add to the discussion there, but here’s an opportunity to chat about the process. My own strong feeling is that how successful you are in school (grad or undergrad) is much more up to you than up to the institution. Most places have more good opportunities than anyone can hope to take advantage of in a limited period of time. Take the initiative, don’t wait for good things to come to you, and have fun!

I happen to be visiting UCSD this week, and woke to the news that Geoffrey Burbidge passed away yesterday afternoon. He was a giant in the field of astronomy and cosmology, and (despite himself) was one of the main contributors to the establishment of the standard Big Bang model of cosmology. He was perhaps best known for his work in stellar nucleosynthesis (encapsulated in the B2FH paper: Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle 1957, Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 547), which in some sense established that we are all made of “star stuff”. There are few research papers that are widely known simply by their author’s initials (especially over 50 years later); the paper even has its own wikipedia page. (Off hand, the only other one I can think of is EPR.)

However, for the past years Burbidge was primarily associated with advocating a steady-state model for the Universe. For many decades this model was incredibly important, as it provided a foil with which to challenge the big bang theory. It pushed us to get as much data as possible, and helped usher in the era of precision cosmology. In some sense, it is because of the steady-state model that we are as confident as we are in the big bang model. [Famously, the very name "big bang" was coined derisively by Hoyle, one of the originators of the steady state model, and the "H" in B2FH.] Burbidge was a proponent of his alternative cosmology, long after the vast majority of people in the field abandoned it. The data became overwhelming (in particular, the incredibly perfect black body spectrum from COBE, and then the completely incontrovertible “acoustic” peaks from WMAP, among other things). Burbidge was adamant that we should always question, and carefully distinguish between data and models. He did not like the “bandwagon” aspect of science, and remained leery of the broad consensus behind the big bang.

There’s an article in our very own Discover Magazine which nicely sums up Burbidge’s personality and science. He did vital and important work in the field, and should be remembered for this.